After entering my classroom at the University of Ottawa, I reach the podium and start up the multimedia system. I will introduce my lecture on sport and French-Canadian identities with a film, Roch Carrier’sLe chandail(The hockey sweater). In this now classic film, based on a story set in the 1950s, a young French-Canadian boy, a fan ofles Canadiens, gets trapped into wearing a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey while playing at his rural Quebec village rink. This situation leads him into a series of problems with the parish priest as well as with his friends, all of whom...

According to many commentators, hockey, the cold outdoors, and dreams of professional hockey stardom still embody what it means to be a young male in Canada. For example, in a recentGlobe and Mailarticle journalist Roy MacGregor suggests that the continued prevalence of art, literature, and theatre-based representations that link hockey with Canadian identity (and in many cases, with nostalgic visions of youth and childhood) is evidence that the national pastime still holds our collective imagination. The article quotes Roch Carrier, author of “The Hockey Sweater”: “When I was growing up, hockey was our ‘politics.’We knew there was somebody...

This chapter is about hockey, gender, race, and Canadian nationalism. There is no deep abiding love of the game beneath this critique, no nostalgia for a pre-expansion nhl, for cleaner styles of play, for the sport’s better days. If it has had better days in my lifetime, I’ve never noticed. Like many women my age (mid-forties) or older, my experiences with hockey are minimal. I can recall watching just one complete televised game: the men’s gold medal match at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. I know that in grade seven we got to go to the school gym for...

Team Canada’s gold medal in women’s hockey at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games was the culmination of a decade of expansion for women’s hockey in Canada. The Olympic victory would not have been possible without a dramatic growth in the competitive opportunities available to Canadian women players, especially at the adult and elite levels. These include intervarsity leagues in both Canada and the United States, the emergence of a senior women’s club system (including the National Women’s Hockey League), and Canadian national women’s programs, encompassing both the senior and under-22 national teams. Although such developments offer many reasons for women...

The issue of violence in Canadian ice hockey is nothing new. There have been reports of “overt brutality evident in open fighting on the ice and in mob scenes involving fans and players” almost from the outset of the modern game.¹ Today the game’s potential for violence continues to be on display at various levels, from youth hockey to the professional leagues. But the incidents that typically get the greatest public attention are those that occur in the nhl . The most prominent recent incident occurred in the winter of 2004 when the Vancouver Canucks’ superstar Todd Bertuzzi suckerpunched Colorado...

The asking of sociological questions is motivated, it is said, by an interest in looking beyond “the commonly accepted, or officially defined, descriptions and explanations of human actions.”¹ Sociology can also lead us to understand that thepersonal troublesthat individuals experience are often products of social structures: enduring structures of power and relative powerlessness that mean that relations between rich and poor or men and women, for example, tend to unfold in familiar and predictable ways.² The American sociologist C. Wright Mills once wrote that the ability to distinguish between the “personal troubles of milieux” and the “public issues...

Despite the Florida Marlins’ improbable 2003 World Series championship, two other events defined that year’s Major League Baseball playoffs. First there was the errant fan who interfered with a foul ball and brought forth yet another collapse by the Chicago Cubs. Second, not to be outdone, baseball’s other lovable losers, the Boston Red Sox, engineered another defeat at the hands of the Yankees. Had manager Grady Little chosen to remove a tiring Pedro Martinez, the Red Sox might have ended the “curse of the Bambino” and eight decades of frustration—instead of finally doing that a year later.

For decades...

Times appear to be “looking up” for the National Hockey League. The impasse between the nhl and the National Hockey League Players’ Association (nhlpa) that wiped out the entire 2004–05 season has been settled. The owners achieved much of the “cost certainty” they wanted, while players lost some of the benefits of the “market system” that had been developed in the previous fifteen years.¹ Still, despite the first optimistic news about the league in several years, the nhl remains in a precarious position within the United States.

There has been a strong perception for many years that the nhl...

One key aspect of the problems facing the nhl is the extent to which professional hockey has failed to catch on in the United States. Despite a concerted effort to increase its exposure in US markets over the past decade, the National Hockey League remains a distant fourth among the four major professional sports leagues in the United States. At one point in the early 1990s, there was much optimism that the league would be able to close the gap between itself and the others. EvenSports Illustrated, notorious for its lack of coverage of hockey, had predicted in a...

On February 13, 1999, the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team played its final game at Maple Leaf Gardens (mlg). As anticipated, it was an evening of carefully orchestrated nostalgia. The visiting team, the Chicago Black Hawks, had opposed the Leafs on November 12, 1931, the night the arena opened its doors. At this last game Red Horner and Howard March, participants in that inaugural match (March scored the first goal) dropped the puck at the faceoff. Later, during the post-game ceremonies, Canadian folk hero Stompin’ Tom Connors led the crowd in a rendition of “The Hockey Song” and Anne Murray...

An understudied aspect of global sport concerns the effects of player migration to the countries in which a sport’s major leagues are based and where the highest salaries are paid.¹ In soccer this tendency has meant migration from Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere (even Canada and the United States) to West European leagues (in Italy, Spain, and Britain, for example) where the game is big business. In hockey it has meant players coming to North America from the former Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, as well as from Scandinavia, Germany, and even Switzerland to pursue careers in the National Hockey League....

Football (soccer) and hockey represent much more than sport for many fans. In South America,futebol(orfutesbol) is said to “have the capacity to make people delirious.”¹ In Europe as early as the 1920s football was considered a sort of cross-national Esperanto. A popular communal practice in many European countries, it provided languages of identity and rivalry that were widely understood. In Africa from the period of colonial rule through the political and economic struggles of the post-independence years, football remained a source of popular enthusiasm and passion, symbolically connected to aspirations for national identity and development.²

Hockey in...